Rushdie's Fury Signifies Little

It is the year 2000, the new millennium is at hand, and Malik Solanka, the hero of Salman Rushdie's haphazard and disappointing new novel, has arrived in New York City in search of a new life.

There, he finds himself immersed in -- no, overcome by -- the noise and cacophony and tumult of this aggressive, swaggering city, and smitten by its whispered promise that here, in this land of material plenitude, one can erase the past, shuck off former identities and embrace a shiny new future.

In the opening pages of Fury, we are shown the teeming streets of a city, where the "everywhereness of life," its "bloody-minded refusal to back off," engulf the passerby. It's a city in the grip of advanced narcissism and money madness, a city where fashionable women wear "featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain goats" and "well-heeled white youths" stylishly simulate indigence while they wait "for the billionairedom that would surely be along sometime soon."

The verbal energy and heightened style of the novel's early chapters, however, soon give way to a more listless, recipelike approach. Though Rushdie weaves his favorite themes -- of exile, metamorphosis and rootlessness -- around Solanka's story, though he tries hard to lend his hero's experiences an allegorical weight, Fury lacks the fierce, visionary magic of The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children. The playful surrealism and improvisatory sleight of hand in those books have been replaced, in these pages, by a paint-by-numbers mixture of the banal and the bizarre. And as the book progresses, Solanka emerges as a strangely synthetic character, hastily assembled out of bits and pieces of fable, metaphor and television talk-show dysfunction.

Certainly Rushdie's earlier novels have been crammed full of implausible elements as well -- children who can travel through time, people falling out of airplanes and surviving -- but in this case, the phantasmagorical flights of fancy have given way to leaden whimsy.

It is hard for the reader to buy the basic premise of Solanka's career: that he is a former Cambridge professor who abandoned the academic life to become the wealthy creator of a wildly popular doll named Little Brain.

It is harder still to buy the premise that he has left his wife and 3-year-old son in England to come to the United States because he is afraid that he harbors murderous impulses and might harm those he loves. Therapy and medication are shrugged off as responses to his blackouts and violent rages -- mainly, it seems, as an excuse for him to wallow in his fear that he may be the killer who has been scalping women in the streets of New York.

Solanka's difficulties with Little Brain and another set of creations called the Puppet Kings are equally unconvincing. In an effort to underscore the nervous relationship between Art and Real Life, a theme the author has frequently dealt with since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a death sentence against him in 1989 for his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie clumsily devises an encounter between Solanka and a woman named Mila, who looks like Little Brain come to life.

Mila wants to pull the dollmaker out of his depressive funk, but Solanka throws her over for a beautiful freedom fighter named Neela, who involves him in the political turmoil in her native country in the South Seas, where revolutionaries wear masks of his Puppet King characters.

These events possess neither the fairy-tale charm of Haroun and the Sea of Stories nor the epic power of the author's best novels.

Rushdie seems to have wanted to write a New York bookend to his big-city novels -- Midnight's Children, which immortalized Bombay, and The Satanic Verses, which immortalized London -- a novel that addressed the lure of the American Dream, its "Jitter Bug" dance of expectation and disappointment. There are fleeting glimpses of that might-have-been novel in Fury, but they are buried beneath perfunctory narrative high jinks, humorless asides and oddly mechanical storytelling -- peculiar lapses for a writer known, in the past, for his literary ardor and ambition.